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Morphed Transition Art, Public Art, and Advertising in Post-Communist Eastern Europe The situation of public art in post-communist Eastern Europe where public monuments of various periods coexist, from communist statues and memorials to the advertising public art of the capitalist economy, can be gleaned from the personal history of three Polish personalities: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and Krzysztof Albin. Krzysztof Wodiczko is undoubtedly one of the most highly acclaimed public artists alive today. Having emigrated to the West in the early 1980s (Òwithout my intentionÒ), he has always based his art projects on his political and social awareness. Since 1981, he has made more than seventy public projections onto public monuments of different cities, his recent projects involving homeless people and illegal immigrants. In 1983, Wodiczko projected images of missiles onto the columns of the (war) Memorial Hall in Dayton, Ohio. In 1986, he projected a horseman with a swastika and a police baton onto a replica of the Venetian equestrian monument in Warsaw for the 47th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland. In this way he questions the common idea of what a monument signifies, and consequently what history means to people. The images he chooses to project further emphasize the intimidating and hectoring aspects of public monuments. Interested not only in the architectural components of a public space but also in how the public lives within it, Wodiczko addresses and brings attention to the most frequent users of public space today: homeless people. Concerned as well with the media of expression, he reminds us that strangers within modern society, or 'aliens', are denied the chance to communicate their voices and stories: ÒHere 'alien' means a state of being and 'becoming' both political and metaphysical, nomadic and migrant -- a sort of psychological encampment in the space and time of today's displaced and estranged world. No aliens, residents, non-residents, legal and illegal immigrants have voting rights, nor any sufficient voice nor image of their own in official 'public space'. When given a chance by the media (mainstream or ethnic) to communicate their experience or to state their opinions, demands and needs, immigrants find themselves framed and silenced.Ò 1 Based on this idea, Wodiczko designed media tools for aliens: Homeless Vehicle, Alien Staff and Porte-Parole. The latter two are part of a series called ÒXenology: Immigrant Instruments,Ò ÒxenologyÒ referring to Òthe immigrant's art of survival.Ò Alien Staff evokes the shape of the biblical shepherd's rod while Porte-Parole is a type of mask for the mouth; both instruments are carried or worn by actual immigrants and are equipped with a small video monitor in which you can see and read the carrier-immigrant's own image and stories. The novelty of the these strange high-tech contraptions, or probably even more so the image on the monitor screen, draw people on the street close to the carrier-immigrants. ÒUpon closer examination, it will become clear that the image on the screen and the actual face of the person are of the same immigrant. The double presence in 'media' and in 'life' invites a new perception of the stranger as 'imagined' (a character on the screen) or as 'experienced' (an actor off-stage a real life person). Since both the imagination and the experience of the viewer are increasing with the decreasing distance, while the program itself reveals unexpected aspects of the actor's experience, the presence of the immigrant becomes both legitimate and real. This change in distance and perception might provide the ground for greater respect and self-respect, and become an inspiration for crossing the boundary between a stranger and a non-stranger.Ò 2 Wodiczko's social consciousness apparently comes from his own experience as an immigrant. Currently head of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, where he has access to the most up-to-date technology, he has the stature to involve himself with a most influential authority: the military. He is thus initiating a post-cold war era project of transferring military research to civilian use, an important part of which is a cultural project involving contemporary artists and designers. Aleksander Kwasniewski is the president of Poland. A former minister for youth affairs and president of state committees for youth and sport for the communist Polish United Workers' Party, he was elected as head of state in 1995, defeating Lech Walesa. His election was a shock and a sensation, because Walesa was nearly a legend for the rest of the world, and because the world regarded the Polish people's choice as a former communist. Walesa was supported by the power of the Catholic Church, putting Kwasniewski, so it seemed, at a big disadvantage. Nonetheless he won. Why, or rather, how? He had a spin doctor. The media advisor he hired is one of the most influential men in the world of advertising, Jacques Seguela. Called a 'media guru', Seguela is best known for his management of Francois Mitterrand's successful 1981 presidential campaign. In addition to Mitterrand and Kwasniewski, he has directed eight victorious presidential campaigns including those for Alpad Gonz of Hungary and Zhelyu Zhelev of Bulgaria, all of which Seguela says are his hobby. Probably it was the collapse of the Berlin wall that made many people in the East aware that the Western advertising agency had arrived, when Saatchi & Saatchi bought a large piece of the wall, including the political graffiti, for advertising purposes. Seguela himself started 'advising' in Eastern Europe in the spring of 1990 for the Hungarian president. In the autumn of the same year the Solidarity movement hired him as an advisor for a campaign of Walesa's. Asked why and how he came to work for Kwasniewski, the former communist, when his policy up until then had been to work only for democrats (he turned down Petr Roman's assignment in Romania mainly because of the misunderstanding of Roman's emissaries about the role of a media advisor,) he explained Ò...[Kwasniewski] is a sort of Polish Kennedy: intelligent, alive, with a certain idea of Poland as De Gaulle would say... [...] He understood in 30 seconds what I had to tell him. From a media point of view, he is the most professional candidate I have come to know, better than Mitterrand and many others.Ò 3 According to Seguela, it was Kwasniewski who told him of his own handicaps: he had the image of a communist when Poland was no longer communist; he was fighting against a stereotype; and he had the church and television against him. Therefore Seguela devised a strategy that turned these weakness into assets: by making people believe that they were mistaken about Kwasniewski's having been a communist (Òwithout ever attacking [the myth] - for one doesn't insult a myth -Ò 4 ); by letting the church take up the fight against Kwasnieski, knowing that people loathe it when the church intervenes in politics, and so on. He defined three stages of the campaign: The initial stage was a tour of all Poland by bus so that Kwasniewski could listen and talk to people at the grassroots level, as Bill Clinton did for his 1994 election campaign. (The same technique was later used by the leader of the Czech Social Democratic Party, Miloä Zeman, with his ÒZem‡kÒ bus, bringing his party major gains in parliamentary seats in the 1996 election.) Seguela insisted, too, upon the emphasis on modernity, arriving at the slogan Òthe choice of the futureÒ, which proved extremely successful. After all, ÒFor some, Kwasniewski represented a past that they remembered with nostalgia; for others, the future.Ò 5 The third axis of the campaign's success was unity, and the slogan for this was ÒSpouna PolskaÒ. Seguela expertly manipulated the Poles' psychology and his strategy worked upon it with precision. Today's politicians rely upon spin doctors for detailed advice on what to do, what to say and how to act. The extent to which politics are shaped by these spin doctors and the degree to which they themselves are convinced that it is they who direct today's politics is seen in Seguela's comments on how he advised Kwasniewski: Ò...[when Walesa accused him of having lied about his tax return] I advised Kwasniewski to tell the truth. [É] [For the Television debate] I advised him to arrive at the debate at the last minute... [É] I told Alexander that when the first journalist posed a question to him, he should get upÉ [É] I told him to show the Ministry of Finance letter attesting that he had paid his taxes... [É] I also told Alexander not to start arranging his papers in front of the cameras at the end of the debate...to get up and to go to shake Walesa's hand, which would give him a winner's image.ÉÒ 6 Kwasniewski followed this advice and the debate became a crucial last minute factor in his victory. Krzysztof Albin was one of the active members, and a spokesman, of the Orange Alternative movement. Based in Wroclaw, the movement swept all over Poland in the 1980s. It started with an idea of the art historian ÒThe MajorÒ, Waldemar Frydrych, as a kind of street theater or rather as Happenings. It was called ÒSocialist SurrealismÒ. Its aim was to ridicule the absurdity of the communist system, and its technique was to be absurd by taking the system seriously in order to make the system look even more absurd. They painted graffiti of dwarfs on the walls all over town. They dressed like Santa Claus at Christmas carrying signs that said ÒOnly Santa Claus can save you from poverty.Ò They made an experiment to find out the number of people that could be stuffed in a police car when one went in from one door and another exited from another door. Finding its support primarily among the youngest generation who hesitated to join either the communists or Solidarity, the Orange Alternative movement sometimes attracted up to 5,000 active participants, for instance when they sang Stalinist hymns in front of the chimpanzee cage at the zoo. It was certainly one of the most original dissident movements in communist Eastern Europe. The movement came to an end and its membership dissolved when democracy became official. The Major went to Paris, and another prominent member became an art critic. Albin now teaches the psychology of advertising at Wloclaw university. I asked him about the psychology of his own transformation from a member of the dissident movement to the world of advertising and how he manages with the shift from the manipulation of one ideology to another ideology. According to him, communist propaganda before 1989 was Òpersuasive communicationÒ and its Òcommunication process was supported by real pleasureÒ but Ònot positive pleasure like political campaigns in Western Europe but a negative one.Ò Much as in Czechoslovakia where a graphic designer such as Joska Skaln’k invented the distinctive design for announcements of cultural activities out of his dissident spirit, Polish underground designs of books, posters and record jackets in the 1980s created Òvery interesting aesthetic valuesÒ, Albin notes. At that time Òthere was no reason to build up the intensive pleasure of advertising for the audience because people were naturally involved in the rhythm of the art world that is no longer actual today.Ò Illegal social movements such as RSA, Freedom and Peace, and Orange Alternative, however, rather unintentionally adopted the principles of advertising because of their effectiveness. Having been the main person for communication between Orange Alternative and the citizens, Albin is strongly aware of how regular and close contact with people is the key to the success of independent activities. Orange Alternative was also Òa negative advertising campaign addressed to the image of socialism.Ò As an American journalist said: ÒSolzenitzyn destroyed communism on the moral level in the late 1980s, Kolakowski did so on the philosophical level, and Orange Alternative did so on the aesthetic level.Ò Now he sees that the language of Orange Alternative has been assimilated into the language of the mass media, especially that of TV. Ironic as it may sound, Albin regards advertising as a means of free expression, towards which Orange Alternative was striving. Advertising has Òstrong but clear principles, which isn't necessarily the case for artÒ. Advertising offers him Òa multi-level message,Ò a realm where Òif you have a clear strategic decision you are completely free.Ò While the distinctions between art, public art and advertising are perplexing, public art often serves as a bridge between art and advertising, overlapping as it does with the properties of both. Along with his admiration for Wodiczko's works today, Paul Von Blum regards Mexican art during the revolutionary period in the early 1920s as having produced some of the most significant examples of public art.7 Numerous murals created by artists such as Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros brought pictorial social criticism to ordinary people on the street. These three artists later brought this trend to the United States, and the whole movement had considerable influence throughout the world, including in Czechoslovakia. The book Mexick‡ Grafika published in Prague in 1955 contains reproductions of hundreds of Mexican social realist paintings; one of the most characteristic works was the mural from 1951 by Rivera about a mural with portraits of Stalin and Mao. Beside the depicted mural are executed people, and underneath are a number of people representing all social classes. Rivera's work is about the very concept of public art itself and it has inspired debate within the art world over about the value and purpose of this form of art. Similarly, works of socialist realism made in the former communist countries have naturally become subjects for disputes over whether they are art or public art, or simply propaganda. Judith Williamson isolated a practice within the coding system of advertising in her book Decoding Advertisements from 1978, based on Claude Levi-Strauss' definition of totemism. According to Levi-Strauss' study of primitive societies, totemism is Òthe use of differences between natural objects to differ-entiate between human groups.Ò In contemporary society, however, advertisements, as Williamson states, Òuse distinctions existing in social mythologies to create distinctions between products...Ò and as a result Ò[we] differentiate ourselves from other people by what we buy.Ò 8 For example, by purchasing Diesel jeans, which are famous for provocative, unconventional, aggressive, and odd advertisements, the hippest young people define themselves as a completely new generation unhindered by the moral systems of the past; as a generation that likes to make even the queerest things tasteful. They are thus Diesel people and are different from Levis people whose image is tied to a more traditionally wild but sensitive, rebellious American man like James Dean. This is also a kind of people's expression of identity by buying those products that differentiate them from others. Williamson also points out that although we can see the analogous phenomena between the totemism that Levi-Strauss describes and totemism in advertising, e.g. the existence of a passage Òfrom a point of view centered on subjective utility to one of objective analogyÒ and Òfrom external analogy to internal homologyÒ 9 there is also a clear difference. Although the totemism that Levi-Strauss describes covers relations Òbetween two series, one natural, the other cultural,Ò 10 Òthe objects that create these 'totemic' groups in advertisements are not naturalÒ and Òwhat is involved are two sets of false differences: between products, and between people, each perpetually redefining the other, through an exchange of meaning in the ad, and an exchange of money in the shop.Ò 11 In the quasi-egalitarian society of communist Eastern Europe, such totemism was theoretically nonexistent but in reality it operated extensively and exclusively by the authority. Williamson sees that 'totemism' becomes part of an ideology, e.g., when advertising successfully makes people believe that they are not buying the product in order to become a part of the group that it represents, but they already and naturally belong to that group and this is the reason for their purchase of it. Forcing communist ideology upon people failed because it was much more overt than this concealed form of manipulation. Hence it was curious when Kwasniewski, who was eager to clean up the image of the communists, won the election by making people believe that those of us who vote for Kwasniewski already and naturally belong to the group that belongs to the future and won't turn back to the old ideology and the morals that belong to the church. Seguela, who helped by inserting the new ideology into the old political sphere, claims he did it as a hobby and not for business -- his tactical technique could thus be seen as artistic in the most ironic sense. The Window Gallery Prague is an exhibition space belonging to the British Council. It is literally only a window display space facing the street, where ambitious and unusual exhibitions have been held, from TOMATO to stills of British sci-fi animation films to Vivian Westwood fashion photos. The exhibitions are thus not necessarily limited to fine art and we can therefore call this a public art gallery. In 1993, the Czech artist JiÞ’ David, who had morphed famous figures such as Vaclav Klaus, showed these altered photographic portraits at the Window Gallery. Morphing is an image making technique that transforms one picture smoothly into another. It had been a very popular technique in both advertising and film in the West since the late 1980s. A man is transformed into an animal, a robot, etc., and one person's face is merged with another face: Thatcher, Gorbachev, to name only a couple of the famous faces mixed and changed. The most well known example is Michael Jackson's music video ÒBlack or WhiteÒ. In the bright color image set to the song's proclamation that color does not matter, morphing is used to mix faces of different races: the Benetton effect. As it is seen here, the morphing technique is significant in the sense that it apparently eliminates the ÒpasswordÒ holding a group's members together. Take the observation of Duncan Smith on gay culture. He considers it as a Òmost oppressiveÒ culture and argues that therefore it needs Òits own metonymic flights.Ò 12 The metonymic flights he describes include that of Levi's 501 jeans: a 'talisman' of the male homosexual. He explains the reason why every crotch of a pair of Levi's forms the shape of the letter V and goes further to explain the whole metonymy of what it symbolizes (V for female genitalia, Y once the five buttons are undone, levis in Latin means ÒlightÒ, etc.) Thus metonymies and synecdoches have been used by people ranging from gay culture to religious groups to 'unite' their members. Hence when the morphing started to be used in advertising, it offered the illusory image that certain groups no longer needed those symbols to unite people. It has given consumers the idea that they already and naturally belong to a group, one big group (Seguela's slogan for Kwasniewski ÒSpouna PolskaÒ). Its effect is that people believe they don't have to buy the product in order to become a part of the group that it represents, but they buy it because they are of that group, and not bound to it by any ideology but are naturally part of it. Morphing had also been used for political messages. Just like British scratch music and videos in the early 1980s, political figures were given messaged transformation with the help of technology, e.g. Margaret Thatcher's and Michael Heseltine's morphed portrait. Moreover, the technique emerged in the particularly significant period of the transition of Eastern Europe, and so its smoothness of transformation was somewhat symbolic. But this extreme smoothness that gives the viewer the impression that two natural things are naturally connected creates a perversion. The more morphed images emphasize the ÒnaturalÒ the more their artificiality becomes overt, which is exactly how it operates in advertising as well. In the latter case consumers buy the product because they are lured by this artificiality. It has a kind of magical effect. Therefore when JiÞ’ David used the technique for his ÒartÒ in the Òpublic artÒ space, another perversion arose: do the portraits morphed by David suggest the morphing of art, public art and advertising? Does it offer a critique of politics, of art or of the flood of advertising? Or is it an expression of David's frustration with the not-so-smooth transition of the society? This whole complex of questions were thus raised. We normally do not plan to see public art and advertisements -- unlike our trips to see art in a museum or gallery; they surround us in the course of our walking or daily activities and sometimes a striking example might make us stop and look. Before I stopped in front of the Window Gallery in 1993 there had been a couple of other occasions in Prague when I stopped in front of advertisements: Czech election campaign commercials for political parties that were broadcast on TV during the first general election in 1990, the billboard advertisements of a Minolta copy machine, and the billboards for the Prague Spring music festival of 1991. The first political advertising campaigns in post-communist society were still made with a pre-Western ad agency mentality. Then came the Minolta copy machine advertisement that represented the Western mode of promoting a Western product. I remember hearing a man in a cafe talking about how he was impressed by the Minolta ad's non-aggressive, not-so-direct selling approach to consumers (the ad shows only one or two people in photo with the copy ÒMinolta and its peopleÒ).This man obviously believed that the method of advertising in the capitalist market was something that convinced you that Òthis is the good product for you, you must buy itÒ. The Minolta ad hence surprised him. The Prague Spring 1991 billboard was the first advertisement that I noticed which applied Western techniques to a local product. The deluge of Western style advertisements since then need no further commentary.13 I have thus far concentrated primarily on the complex history of three Polish men as a way to examine the complexity of the relationship among art, public art, and advertising. The hypothesis is that post-communist society is at just the right stage for the embossing of the contiguity of the three different approaches to audio-visual expression, because both these societies and these inter-related forms of expression fundamentally involve a mixture of ideology, identity and volition. Within the environment of this region today people live next to socialist monuments that still remain in many places right next to big billboards replete with luxurious products, a daily juxaposition which captures the problem. For artists, this is the environment that they have to confront and/or are eager to depict in their art, on top of their interaction with the new market economy in art itself. Thus several forms of art have emerged as a passage for the ÒtransitionÒ, such as installation and Internet. An art curator who works for a large state art institution, namely the National Gallery in Prague, once told me that those within the institution's administration , i.e. those who still remain from the former time, did not understand why artists had to be invited to the museum space. This episode suggests that in the communist time they dealt only with dead artists, or only with paintings or sculptures and not with installation or performance art that involve an artist's physical presence. This necrophiliac attitude to art, which must have created monstrous ghosts, is in fact antithetical to the idea of installation art and could be examined further as a way to understand this type of work. Installation art requires corporeality: that of objects and that of materials, that of artist and that of audience. The corporeality must occupy a certain space and time, in another words what Margaret Morse calls the Òhere and nowÒ. For her this is particularly the case for video installation, Ò...these new arts explore expression on the plane of presentation and of subjects in a here and now.Ò 14 In contrast to painting and sculpture, the artist requires the active participation of the audience to actualize the work. Because there is no frame of a picture, the aura of artist has been weakened. This type of work is rather difficult to commodify but it has nonetheless become more and more in demand by museums and galleries because these institutions themselves have been changed as a result of installation art. The subjectivity and identification of both the artist and audience have also changed because of the physical involvement of the audience. And this is also the case with the Internet. It is not so much corporeality, which is of such importance for installation art, but subjectivity and identification that have been deeply affected since the Internet became popular. On the Net one can act and/or live in cyberspace theoretically as, and with, a number of different egos. Conventional status, social position and hierarchy have been said to be diminished (and to be replaced by other structures). Authorities and corporations have not yet been successful at systematically controlling or censoring expression over the Internet, and so it still enjoys its status as an autonomous free zone. It is a public art space, digital and internal, although externally being on the Net is an absolutely solitary act. Thus, artists in this transition society have found these two forms of art advantageous. This tendency includes some other forms such as virtual reality or what is widely called 'interactive art' (employing high technology) that combine the key principles of both installation and Internet art. Whether artists, benefiting from these new forms of expression, have the sort of impact upon the general public which leads them to not only stop and watch but also actively participate in the work, just like the Mexican artists' influence on both the art world and public, or whether they create works that are used only for self-satisfaction or the hermeneutic art system, all depends on the artists' consciousness. This is to me as interesting a development to follow as whether Wodiczko will succeed at making the most advanced technology accessible to the general public in the context of public art as he has been in the previous projects with more readily available machinery, as whether Kwasniewski will truly capture the Polish people's hearts and minds and becomes a statesman, and as whether Albin becomes a unique provocateur intimate with both the world of social movements and the world of advertising. The other day I found this advertisement for Morphing on the Internet: Morphing for Under 100 Bucks -- ...While just about everyone has seen morphing used for high-tech special effects, most aren't aware that it can also be used by the average man for personal entertainment. (For instance, you could morph a picture of your mother-in-law with one of [É] in the privacy of your own home!)...15 Or is this merely somebody's statement? This is peculiar to the Internet: the blurring of the boundary of art-public art-advertisement. Then I imagined possibly the most abbreviated picture of public art in transition society, that I stop in front of a window gallery having noticed an artist's morphed portraits of politicians beside which sits a computer that shows an advertisement for morphing on the Net. Keiko Sei Writer Notes:
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